“Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, ‘Go, select an animal from the flock according to your families, and slaughter the Passover animal. Take a cluster of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and brush the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood in the basin. None of you may go out the door of his house until morning. When the Lord passes through to strike Egypt and sees the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, he will pass over the door and not let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Blood is really important. That’s true physically, of course, as we die if we lose too much of it. It’s also true in various other symbolic ways. Relationally speaking, we talk about blood relatives versus those who are just relatives by marriage. Familialy, there is the saying that “blood is thicker than water,” meaning we are going to have closer relationships with our family members than non-family members. When they put ratings on movies, part of what determines how restrictive of a rating a particular film gets is how much blood gets splattered across the screen. Bloody violence gets rated higher than non-bloody violence (think Deadpool versus Star Wars). Blood has also long played an important role in our religious practices. This was the case in the first Passover. Let’s talk about why and what is going on in this next part of the story.

Let’s be honest enough out of the gate here to acknowledge that the idea of slaughtering an animal, saving some of its blood, and then painting some of that blood on the door frame of our house sounds weird. This is one of those things you read in the Old Testament and immediately think to yourself, ‘He wanted them to do what now?”

The Old Testament is full of places like this. What we are forced to constantly keep in mind is that how folks then thought about and interacted with the world were vastly different from how we do it today. The assumptions they made about what made sense and what didn’t often leave us baffled. So, when we see something like this that doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, we need to take a moment to remind ourselves of this fact: They thought differently than us. They had a mental category for a god asking them to do something like this. This would have made sense to them even if it doesn’t to us or God wouldn’t have commanded them to do it. That all said, though, this still doesn’t answer our question as to why. What was the big deal with the blood?

Blood was symbolic for them. It was symbolic for all kinds of different ancient religions. It still holds much of that same symbolic power today. In the Christian church we talk about being covered in the blood of Christ using imagery that borrows directly on what was happening here. Blood was and is symbolic for the life force of a creature. The blood contains the power of life that is in it. This is why some ancient pagan rituals involved drinking the blood of a creature. This was believed to give the consumer the power of the animal to make him stronger than he was before. In this particular case, the blood was symbolic of the life force of the animal covering the Israelites residing in the house being passed over by the Destroyer.

The use of blood as a covering like this was also fairly common not only in the ancient world generally, but in various religious practices that are laid out later in Exodus and Leviticus. It was often put on the outermost extremities of whatever it was intended to protect. The thought was that whatever the force that might intend you harm reached first was covered in such a way that the protection was quickly recognized and acknowledged.

In this particular case, as the Lord was going through Egypt, bringing judgment in the form of the death of the firstborn sons throughout the land, any house that was marked by blood like this was an indicator that this male animal had been sacrificed on behalf of the firstborn sons in that particular house and was thus already serving as a substitute for them. Any house that was not so marked meant no sacrifice had been made and the firstborn sons within it would be taken.

Now, this whole thing raises some interesting and difficult questions. Let me set two before us this morning. First, why put the people through all of this? God is God. He’s numbered the hairs on our heads. He knew exactly who was in every single house He passed by in this process. He knew where all the firstborn sons were. He knew if a particular house He went past was filled with Egyptians or Israelites. What was the point of all this ritual when He already had all the information He needed to be judicious with His judgments? Second, why go through this whole show of moving through the land rather than just making His strike once and being done with it? Why all the drama and suspense?

The answer to both of these questions is roughly similar. None of this was being done for God. This was being done for the people. God didn’t need any of this stuff. The people did. They needed to understand the seriousness of what was happening. They needed to understand the gift of life that was being given to them by the Lord. By slaughtering the sacrificial animal themselves and by painting its blood on their door posts and lintels, they were being reminded that it could have been them who were on the receiving end of this act of judgment. God’s grace is ultimately the thing that protected them, not the blood, but the blood served as a symbolic device to help them get their minds and hearts wrapped a bit more fully around what was happening.

The truth is that we are all deserving of judgment. None of us deserves grace. Grace, by its very definition, isn’t ever deserved. Then it wouldn’t be grace. Because of sin, though, we all owe our lives to God. When we sin, we are taking our lives from God. We are announcing that even though He created us and owns us, we are now in charge of ourselves and will make decisions for ourselves from now on. Sin is a great theft. The only way we can be made right with God again after such an act is to return what was taken, namely our lives. But without our lives, all we have is death. Relationships aren’t possible when we’re dead. So, in His mercy and grace, God sent His Son, Jesus, to give up His life on our behalf. Because He was willing to lay down His perfect life as a substitutionary sacrifice for ours, the debt we owed for the taking of our lives is now covered by His life. Or, to stick with the imagery here in the text, we are covered by His blood.

In this story, God was giving the Israelites a way to understand what was happening on their behalf. They were being redeemed from bondage in Egypt. God was willing to accept these sacrifices in exchange for their lives. In a greater sense, though, He was pointing forward to an even greater sacrifice that was coming when the time was right. That’s the one that we benefit from today. Thanks be to God.